- Welcome to Mutually Inclusive.

I'm your host, Kylie Ambu.

When remembering the Holocaust, we often look back on the horrific details of life in the concentration camps, but for those who made it out, a new battle arose, how to keep going, pushing forward and setting into a new life, in a new city, alone.

On today's episode of Mutually Inclusive, we examine a push from our local Jewish communities to preserve the memories of our area's Holocaust survivors.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Support for Mutually Inclusive comes from the W.K Kellogg Foundation, a partner with communities where children come first.

- There's a lot of different qualities I probably could bring out about my father.

He was strong obviously, by what he went through.

He was a very ambitious person, a very focused person.

- [Reporter] 73847, those are the numbers that Linda Pestka will never forget living for decades on her father Henry Pestka's forearm, a painful reminder about the crimes against him in the Holocaust.

- He really was not very communicative about his personal experience.

He did talk about some things but I believe there was such a heaviness and sorrow to what his life had been.

That it was almost his way of dealing with reality to live in the present.

- [Reporter] The Holocaust claimed an estimated 6 million victims during its rampage.

Pestka was the only member of his family to escape from the Nazi run concentration camps in 1944 when he managed to flee during a forced march.

Settling in Grand Rapids, he lived a successful life and is survived by his two children.

Rising from early jobs and factories to managing a national real estate career, Pestka leaving a legacy, Linda is pushing to preserve.

She and her brother Steve are working with the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids to establish the city's first Holocaust memorial.

The peace anchored by Arielle Schlesinger's Ways To Say Goodbye will debut at Frederik Meijer Gardens this summer paying tribute to Pestka and the millions of Jews touched by the genocide.

Among hearing the news, conversation sparked in academic circles.

- I guess like most pandemic stories, it sort of begins on Zoom.

I was invited to participate in a group that wanted to talk about this Holocaust Memorial.

As we were talking, it was clear that there was a real sentiment to do more than just direct a statue and say, now we're done.

Something that would give the background.

- [Reporter] Along with the new Memorial will come a website hosted by the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids tracking down the stories of survivors who settled in our neighborhoods building businesses, relationships and legacies.

- Grand Rapids has a very small Jewish community.

If there are a thousand people, I don't know that there are that many, it's very small.

Nevertheless, we realized we could name at least a dozen Holocaust survivors.

Many of these people were very successful in the United States and people know them and knew a lot about them.

But if you ask even some of their acquaintances what they knew about Henry Pestka life in Poland, they really couldn't say much.

- People in the Holocaust had lives just like we do.

And then they unbelievably, and it's very regrettably changed.

The website talks about their personal story of their family, how they were picked up, deported.

In some cases, I'm sure that we'll talk about how their families were lost.

- [Reporter] The website funded by Mort, Raleigh and the late Ed Finkelstein is pulling resources from across the local Jewish community, digging through archives and utilizing geographic information system mapping to preserve the stories of more than a dozen Holocaust survivors.

- You trace their stories.

You think Henry Pestka managed to escape from a concentration camp.

Joseph's Stevens managed to pretend that he was a member of the Polish Underground and fought against the Nazis.

That combination of these kind of fascinating narratives with the place, the visuals, I think will make this a really interesting approach.

- The most important thing to me is that it's documented, honestly, because unfortunately in this day of Holocaust denial and the mammoth increase of antisemitism, this is real.

You can't take this away by other people spreading false information and it needs to be done.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Support for Mutually Inclusive comes from the W.K Kellogg Foundation, a partner with communities where children come first.

(upbeat music) If you want to join the conversation, follow WGVU on Facebook, on Twitter at WGVUpublicmedia and @KylieAmbu, use the #mutuallyinclusive.

Past episodes and the Mutual Inclusive newsfeed can be found at wgvu.org/mutuallyinclusive.

- And with so much coming to our area this year in the way of Holocaust remembrance we really have to expand on this conversation and here to help us do that is Nicole Katzman executive director of the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids and folks that you'll be familiar with from that previous video, Linda Pestka who sits on the Federation's board, as well as Rob Franciosi see a professor of English and literature at Grand Valley State University.

Thank you all so much for joining in today on this discussion.

And like I said big things that are coming to the West Michigan area.

I am just gonna send it out to anyone here, to just chat with me right now about where we're at in the process whether it's the Memorial, as well as the website, where are we at with things right now?

- Well, I can start by saying that the Holocaust Memorial sculpture, Ways To Say Goodbye by Arielle Schlesinger is getting ready to be installed in its permanent site at Meijer Gardens.

And we are having a celebration, a ribbon cutting event on June 30th.

And it is really going to be exciting to see the sculpture in the place that it'll be for hopefully, generations.

I also wanna say that it's our hope that on June 30th at the website, we'll be ready.

We are working on an app for the phone so that when you are viewing the sculpture, you can pull up the website and you can learn about the Holocaust survivors that we have researched under Rob Franciosi's direction.

- Wonderful and Rob, I wanna throw it out to you because in talking about the Memorial going to Frederik Meijer Gardens, you had said, there's this want and need to have a bit more education to really highlight how have things been going with the website and really tracking down all of this important information about survivors?

- Well, it's a long process.

And in part, because when you dig into the life story of an individual, you get fascinated by it.

And sometimes two hours later, you come up for air and you think, wow, I've just been researching this one detail, trying to find out where Henry Pestka was at any given moment in the 1940s.

So, the real benefit of the website is that unlike say a publication, it's not fixed.

And by that, I mean, it's not, like a fly in amber, it evolves.

And so we can add, we can correct.

It will develop over time.

And that's one of the reasons we decided to go in this direction and I think it will benefit from being out there because the hope is that when people look at the website, they might say, oh I have a great photograph of this person.

Or I knew that person.

And there's something I want to add to the story.

- Absolutely and that's such the beauty of technology where you're able to continue to grow all of that information.

Linda, your late father, Henry, is going to be one of the survivors that are listed.

Have you gotten a chance to see his page on the website yet?

Or how are you feeling about everything?

- Well, first of all thank you for having me this afternoon, very appreciate it.

And I am very, sometimes you don't know if happy is the right word, but there's a certain energy and positive feeling about this website and this Memorial happening at Meijer Gardens this June 30th will be the ribbon cutting and actually a celebration, even though that's an unusual word to say with Holocaust, but it is a celebration.

It's a celebration of memory.

And it's also a celebration to me of a certain piece as a child of a survivor, because there isn't a lot of peace when you know what happened to them but it is putting a permanent eternal memory of not only my father, but of all the survivors.

And actually more than that, of all the people who perished because it is bringing light to something that really has a lot of darkness.

But by doing that, you are showing future generations this really did happen and you can learn more from this experience by the Memorial, the website and future programming.

So, it is a very positive thing for Grand Rapids and I believe it will be very impactful.

- And I know that you had said we had talked earlier and you had kind of discussed just how this idea for Memorial got brought up.

It is kind of making way being the first of its kind here in the Grand Rapids area.

I have to ask, how does it feel to be able to bring something like this?

- That's a hard one.

- Yeah.

- I actually feel like as much as the word is hard to describe, it's a responsibility and I feel proud, I guess would be the simple word, but more than that, it's about bringing information and programming and hopefully most importantly, making a difference so that these kinds of things never occur again.

And with we're kind of going into a different section but yet very impactful is when you think about the Holocaust, there's also the present time and how there are Holocaust deniers and many acts of anti-Semitism that is happening, it's on the rise.

And I was looking at some literature or some information I should say regarding that.

And even in 19, excuse me, in 2020 even though the Jewish population makes up less than 2% of the United States, and this is from the FBI there's almost 60% of that is regarding Jewish people.

So when you think about that, those terms, that's enormous.

And certainly nothing we want to keep continuing.

So our hope is by having something of this nature as a knowledge, it's truth, we are not, it isn't something, well this is an organization only believes what they want.

This is fact and fact is fact.

You know, I was looking at the ADL and they have a tracker where it actually shows acts.

And that has to be documented what is actually considered an act antisemitism or religious based crime.

It isn't just, oh, it is, because we want to think that there is a criteria to make it that way.

And I was just looking at last week and I believe there were nine reported, met the criteria acts of antisemitism in the United States.

And that varied from swastika, probably three or four were bomb threats.

One was actually in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

So, it is important to keep bringing this out and hopefully for youth to understand and there's a saying that often is heard about the Holocaust and it's four words and its, lest we never forget.

And that's what this is about.

- Absolutely and you're talking about these acts against the Jewish community.

I know that even just back in 2020, there was a vandalized Jewish cemetery right here in Grand Rapids.

And that made national news.

Nicole, I have to ask, what does the federation feel when things like that happen so close to home?

What are some of the conversations that are happening when acts like this do occur in our own backyard?

- Well, on behalf of the Federation and our board we take these acts against the Jewish community very, very seriously.

And they hurt, it's very scary to think that anyone is wanting to hurt innocent people is scary.

And what I like is being proactive.

And I think getting back to the Holocaust Memorial, this is a sign that the Jewish people are not going to just allow these hate groups to scare us.

And we have pride and we are going to continue to practice and celebrate Judaism and be Jewish people and not like these kinds of things, people fully or harass us.

So we take it very, very seriously.

- And I know that Linda had said, there's a skyrocketing notion of antisemitism happening right now.

Rob you've told us before in previous conversations, there's kind of reason to that.

And a lot of that falls in politics.

Can you kind of expand on that theory that you shared with us before?

- I think antisemitism has been called the longest hatred.

It has over a thousand year history and it is often used as a kind of strange political weapon for all sorts of complicated reasons.

I mean, one could argue that when Vladimir Putin talks about de-Nazifying Ukraine that is when Ukraine has a Jewish president there's something inherently conflicted about that and contradictory.

And I think that it goes back to Jews as being perceived as outsiders even in societies where they've lived for a thousand years.

And we know that what we'd call the process of othering people of making them not be part of the collective is the first step to all sorts of disasters and discrimination.

And so, it's always felt to me that because of the long, long, and deep history of antisemitism that its lessons translate to other groups.

And if, we've had Holocaust education for decades now, and the persistence of antisemitism is really quite troubling because the the root of the Holocaust is in antisemitism not any other complicated motivations.

And so, the educational component is, it's an ongoing battle and struggle to a lot of people who will say never again but really look the other way in the face of these events.

And I think having a local presence through this Memorial and through the website brings these experiences home to people in a way that you don't get from a history book or a documentary about people who, yeah, they're on the screen.

You don't really know them, but when you start thinking that these were former neighbors, people who still have family now in West Michigan area and you realize it wasn't that long ago that many of them were running for their lives, I think that's really important.

And it applies beyond just the Jewish community but to other communities under pressure.

- One component of the website that we're going to have is an education piece, a curriculum that we're working closely with the Anti-Defamation League.

And we will be using two of the, I guess, curriculums.

And these will be accessible to educators and to adults.

And it is one of them is on the origins of antisemitism.

And the other is on harassment and bullying and implementing these into our school system is really the next step so that we can educate the future generation of children on Holocaust.

- And when we talk about education, something I know Linda was really passionate about in our earlier discussions was, was that education component.

'Cause as Rob said, there are so many people who say, oh, never again.

There's a large chunk of people who also say it never happened.

So when we talk about Holocaust education, I mean how important is that at this time when there are so many Holocaust deniers out there?

- I just wanna ask you Kylie, are you asking how important is it to have an educational component?

- Yes and I suppose I'm saying that almost in a rhetoric way, understanding that the Holocaust did in fact happen and understanding the importance but I guess saying, at a time right now when antisemitism seems to be on the rise and there still are mass groups of people who say the Holocaust did not happen.

How does providing education to children, I guess impact how we'll view the Holocaust and how, preserving these stories will happen over time?

- I think, if that's okay I would like to at least have some comments on that.

I think it's a vital who have an educational component regarding something of the origin of the Holocaust.

Because for one reason, if you didn't know about the Holocaust and someone said it happened, you may not even believe that to be true because it was such a horrendous act that went on for years and years and years, over and over again.

And it's almost unfathomable that something like that could occur, such barbaric acts that were murder.

I mean, people say they perished, but they were murdered.

This was not, these were not accidents and you died.

These were deliberate acts against a group of people, that being said, not just Jews.

There were certainly many other French groups that were considered not what they wanted as far as what the mold was for an area in society.

So, you have to have that for so many reasons.

And especially when you think about youth, there's different ages that may be viewing the Memorial or learning a topic in school as far as history of the world.

And it has to be broken down I would say into segments as for younger kids who probably more pertinent information for younger, for middle, for older, even in college age.

And of course, for adults too.

But as a parent, myself and a grandparent myself, we want this to keep turning and that information will be there available for all ages.

And hopefully, using especially a curriculum based approach, there will be ways to interface with teachers and school systems to broaden that.

So that they'll have a more accessible way to share and learn about that experience and make it impactful.

- Kylie, given the title of your program here, Mutually Inclusive, one of my hopes for this website and Memorial is that it pushes people to ask the really fundamental questions that we might assume they understand but many people don't, who are the Jews, what have they contributed to American society?

There are a lot of people and I've had this with students in my classes who are interested in the Holocaust, they're interested in studying the event but they don't have any knowledge of who the victims were.

They don't have any knowledge of what it means to be Jewish in America.

And that I see as a very positive offshoot of this.

You can, as an analogy, you can study the history of American slavery, but that doesn't define the Black experience in this country.

And I think that's needs to be true for this that it perhaps can be a window into people saying, well, what did those people believe who were persecuted and who are they today, where are they today?

I think that can be a positive outcome from this.

- Certainly, and you all are providing so much representation as well as education over the issue.

So I just say, thank you so much for joining me for this discussion today.

Thank you for joining us as well.

And for more information just head to our website, wgvu.org/mutuallyinclusive.

We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Support for Mutually Inclusive comes from the W.K Kellogg Foundation, a partner with communities where children come first.

(upbeat music) If you want to join the conversation, follow WGVU on Facebook, on Twitter @WGVUpublicmedia and @KylieAmbu, use the #mutuallyinclusive.

Past episodes and the Mutually Inclusive newsfeed can be found at wgvu.org/mutuallyinclusive.

(upbeat music)